The Energy Of Slaves: Oil And The New Servitude, by Andrew Nikforuk

This book is among the worst books I have ever read, and I do not say that lightly. What makes it such a terrible book is that it tries to write a book length essay (or series of essays, with each chapter focusing on a slightly different aspect of the same issue) of a problem/solutions topic but it spends all of its space talking about the problems and none of them talking about the solutions. A book like this is worse than useless because a useless book simply wastes one’s time and does not provide anything useful. This particular book is aggressive in seeking to paint our society’s devotion to the search for power in a negative light but without providing any possible solution to it. If leisure and civilization require some sort of excess power and energy that are siphoned off by a cultured elite, as seems to be the case from our reading of human history and our own experience as people, then the only choices mankind can have are to have someone or something serve as slaves to provide a better life for others, or we have to live as hunter gatherers with very low populations and population densities to live sustainably on the earth. Those are the only options, and the author, despite ruthlessly pointing out the harm that mankind has done to other people and to the resources of the earth in the search for power, does not draw the obvious conclusion that he wants billions of people to die so that the ones who are left can either be an elite supported by slaves or hunter gatherers who ruthlessly control their population to make the least impact on the earth.

This book is about 250 pages long and is divided into thirteen chapters that each serve as their own essays about matters relating to energy. The book begins with a short prologue and then begins its discussion by looking at the energy that slaves provided societies for most of human history (1). The author then gets on his hobby horse about people being slaves to energy (2), discussing the origins of oil development (3) and the servitude involved in our current world (4). The author talks about the unsettling of agriculture (5) as well as ill-fated forays into population dynamics (6). The author then spends time talking about the supposed delusions of urban planners (7) and economics (8), as well as the limits of science investment, which are own the downturn (9), never stopping to think about his own delusions in saying that California is a successful example of a non-dysfunctional petrostate, because it suits the author’s leftist politics. The author then discusses the petrostate (10), heaping abuse on moderate and right-of-center politics, discusses issues of surpluses (11), discusses the relationship between oil and happiness (12), and then writes about Japan and the fragility of the petroleum age (13). The book ends with a wildly wrongheaded epilogue, sources, acknowledgements, and an index.

What does this book accomplish besides trying to make people feel bad? The book seeks to take aim at the elites who drive energy use, but the book’s author and those who support the book and talk about sustainability are the type of hypocrites who fly their private jets to places like Davos and talk about how ordinary people need to live more austere lives without appliances and central heat and air while they spare themselves no luxury. Indeed, the author criticizes elites who live far higher lives than the earth can support as well as the way that energy sources like oil encourage bloated governments, but then advocates harsh environmental regulations that also stem from bloated and wasteful governments, even as the author decries the wastes involved in our energy usage. The author has a lot of talking points, and interviews a lot of equally dim-witted neo-Malthusians like himself who serve as the people to present ideas because he lacks the courage to state what he supports in this book outright, but the book is greatly harmed by it being incoherent. In the end, what makes a book like this one among the worst ever is its incoherence, in that it lacks a logical connection between the points it is making and the evidence that it argues from. At the end the author opines about how it was that the Benedictines chose to leave cities and live simple lives, not mentioning that it was the catastrophic fall of Rome that brought the simple life back again. Is the author really unaware of what he is supporting?